survIvIng mAstery 175terful relations. Alongside Jack Halberstam, we might say that the undo-
ing of masterful subjectivities can be located precisely in mastery’s disap-
pointments, in understanding failure as “a refusal of mastery” (2011, 11).
The decolonial texts analyzed across Unthinking Mastery teach us that our
“ways of inhabiting structures of knowing” are ways that obscure and legiti-
mate the masterful fracturing of particular bodies, spaces, and things (12).
When we open ourselves to the ways that texts can teach us, what we
begin to learn is our own undoing. If it is no longer au courant to claim as
intellectuals our “mastery” over our disciplines (and I’m not sure that it is
not), this change of language does not undo the drive to think of ourselves
as the active subjects of reading and the texts we read as the inanimate ob-
jects that confirm our declarative knowledge. To distance ourselves from
mastery is, first, an act of reframing our relations to all things, regardless of
whether in the moment we bestow them with something currently called
“life.” From this point of departure, directionality becomes infinite and fail-
ure a process we might begin to meet with pedagogical delight.
Because our tendency has been to map history and time as and for the
human (the histories of certain lives, certain collectivities, a certain “spe-
cies”), we register only a shallow sense of embodiment and time. Edward
Said (1979) and Antonio Gramsci (1971) mutually insist that we compile
inventories of the infinite traces that history has left in us as subjects. Ex-
panding Gramsci and Said, we must begin to understand that such “traces”
far exceed human histories and the human subjectivities that history pro-
duces. While Fredric Jameson has famously urged us to “always historicize”^
(1981, 9), Christopher Breu compels us to look to histories far longer and
more inclusively than we have done to date (2014, 28). The surface and
deep traces that comprise us as beings are traces that entail not only other
human lives that have touched ours but also and vitally the infinite forms of
being that far predate and give rise to us as particularly formed subjects. At
different moments across Unthinking Mastery, I have turned back to myself,
sifting through some of those traces that comprise me. Those trees I have
planted in clear- cut forests are still growing, amid words, affects, and foot-
prints also left behind. I have also deposited traces in places I have never
been, such as in the Arctic where polar ice caps are receding and through
absence leaving behind their own devastated traces. Those traces left in me
and those I leave behind constitute me as a subject. We live because we have
deposited energy and matter into the world and because forces well beyond